In a research study done in August 2011, LinkedIn was used the most by journalists for consuming news, understanding it better and engaging with their audience.

The top online activities for journalists was reading news (98%), source leads (91%), create an online identity (69%), micro-blogging (66%), and research (33%).

Industry sources were the top ways to get stories, followed by PR contacts, press releases, wire services and then email pitches.

How can you do these tasks on LinkedIn?

Building and Online Identity The top reason that people started using LinkedIn originally was to create an online professional profile. Make sure to fill out the full profile. Add publications using the publications feature that was launched a few months.

Manage Relationships Use the filters feature.

Finding Sources There’s no better tool than the Advanced Search. It makes it very easy to drill down. The Reference Search may also be rally helpful to find anyone in your network that may have worked at a specific place.

Track Leads

Research The most underrated feature is Signals.

Louis Gray

Google+ is a new social destination, but it’s also a social layer over all of Google’s products. Google+ serves as the social spine that underpins all of Google. It uses search to enhance what we know about your relationships and social networks.

There are 170M+ users on Google+. +1s are a simple indication that someone liked your stuff. Circles makes it very easy for you to share with different people. Hangouts connect face-to-face-to-face with anyone around the world. We’ve been really excited to see the media tap into the power of hangouts. Photos are a big piece of any social network, and we’ve worked hard to make them pop. Ripples is great – I named it – let’s you see how popular something is across networks.

Mark Coatney

Tumblr wants to be completely customizable for your own self-expression. You can make it look like anything.

The mechanics of Tumblr: Break the traditional content process is broken down – you just put up text, just a photo, etc. The other part is the follow and reblog function. This is the useful part of Tumblr that makes it work.

There are 61m Tumblr blogs, 142m monthly uniques and 65m new posts each day. There are a good mix of people, some are power users, some don’t go on consistently.

The demographics are 54% female and 46% male, with 18% being 13-17 year olds, 44% being 18-44 year olds, 23% being 35-49 year olds and the remainder being 45+.

High level of use in North America and Europe, and the usage times favor evening and weekends.

You as an organization are talking on the same level playing field of all the people you’re talking with. With Tumblr, you’re having a back-and-forth with your readers. It’s a way into an organization that was traditionally thought of as a brick wall.

Greg Galante

Why do journalist need social media and why social media needs journalists?

I joined Twitter early, and we saw that people were starting to take it seriously. What if we created an awards show to highlight Twitter stars? Great, so we started the Shorty Awards.

In 2009, we started Muck Rack as a way to verify and connect journalists, you can go there to see what’s being tweeted and who’s tweeting it. We’ve done the hard work of making sure you’re following legitimate journalists, with verified information. Which journalists are top of their beat, talking about the topics I need, using social information.

Tyler Hellinge

We see people misunderstand Facebook a lot.

People think about now a little too much – the new app, the new website, the new shiny piece of technology. This is a miss, technology changes so fast, and people change slowly.

Therefore, it’s wise studying the people and what they’re doing on the platform instead of the technology.

People applying the way they work with existing media in a social way. Facebook is an incredible opportunity, a huge number of users, let’s capture their attention and disrupt that. But that’s not going to work long-term.

We think frequent, light-weight interactions are what will work. It’s about people and relationships, and these interactions are how those relationships are built.

It’s about going from the mentality of “how many people can I bowl over with my one piece of paid media” to “how can I insert a piece of media into a community and let it grow there.”

Put out content, let people interact with that content, and taking those interactions and putting back out into the network.